Downing Street: Apparent Progress Followed by Retrenchment

The Nation's David Corn is another boob who generally gets my dander up, but in writing about the Downing Street Memo he does manage to concede a fundamental truth which is evident to anyone with a brain, namely that the word "fixed" does not necessarily mean fabricated.

But this discussion made me realize that perhaps those Bush critics waving the DSM around as gotcha evidence have placed too much emphasis on the "fixed" sentence. I suppose one could read it to mean that Richard Dearlove (aka C), the head of the British MI6, was telling Blair that the Bushies were "gearing" intelligence and facts toward their desire for war. Or perhaps he was indicating that they were building a case for war with whatever facts and intelligence they could find. All of these possibilities come across as somewhat dodgy. But maybe C did not mean "fixed" as in "rigged."

That this has had to be explicated seems to me rather silly, but it is so often part of the game when it comes to the unhinged Left that I am used to it. However, unsatisfied with the result of such an exercise in elementary logic, Corn goes on to enunciate the new bullseye of the Left's ever-moving Bush Lied Who Died target:

C says he (sic) consultations in Washington indicated Bush wanted war. Yet Bush told the public otherwise. Not news? Only if you think a president misleading Americans about his desire for war is not worthy of attention. All the focus on the "fixed" issue might be a distraction. This memo is evidence--more evidence, I should say--that Bush was committed to war from the start and said whatever needed saying (truth be damned) to sway the citizenry.

So to summarize, the issue is no longer the ruse that Bush fabricated the intelligence on Iraq's WMD (which we already knew), it is that Bush had already made the decision to go to war, despite his statements to the contrary.

*stupified*

Um. Duh. Is David Corn on the vanguard of those Bush opponents who are finally waking up to reality? With some smelling salts can we anticipate an eventual realization that Jimmy Hoffa ain't coming back? I, for one, thought it rather apparent that Bush was ready to go to war in the summer of 2002. In fact, I even thought that many of Bush's opponents were quite clear in making this very point. So I'm rather astonished that we're getting in such a lather about it in 2005.

I don't want to make excuses for the President, but I see no legal or ethical dilemmas posed by these actions. I believe Bush was prepared to use force in Iraq, but was convinced by Colin Powell and Tony Blair to give diplomacy one more shot, in the form of the UN inspectors saga which played out over six months during the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2003. Bush, like the rest of us (I thought), knew that Saddam wasn't going to play ball on inspections. But the impeachable offense is now that he told the public that force was the last resort? Does the Commander in Chief now have to be at perpetual disadvantage because he no longer has the latitude to practice strategic diplomacy? Does he now have to lay all of his cards on the table 100% of the time because the hyper-literal David Corns and Michael Moores and Junior Foreign Policy Expert crowd demand it? It seems a rather naiive expectation considering these are the same folks who deliver us elegantly meaty conspiracy theories driven by Internet loonies as fact-based reporting.

Bottom line: I don't believe that Bush was particularly desirous of war for a variety of reasons. The economic and budgetary impacts of going to war in the midst of a recession could not have appealed to him. The specter of thousands of flag-draped coffins (and pre-war, some estimates had casualties at 10,000 or more) returning from the Middle East on the brink of a re-election campaign certainly didn't appeal to the Karl Rove political machine. The risks associated with triggering a wider war or impinging oil flows from the region should Iran or Saudi Arabia or Israel sustain meaningful body blows from Saddam also had to give him reason for concern. Did Bush really want to spend precious political capital on an unpopular war which would obviously sidetrack other international and domestic agenda items just because he wanted to avenge his father's nemesis? For oil? For Halliburton? For Israel? So he could land a plane on an aircraft carrier? Because he gets a kick out of death and destruction and writing letters to grieving mothers?

I think Bush realized that our 9/11 lesson was that irrationality emanating from the Middle East was a significant threat to America and that it would be hard to argue that there was a greater source of irrationality in the region than Saddam. That boil needed to be lanced. Bush was willing to give the UN one final go, but in order for that effort to be credible the potential use of force also had to be credible. And if you're going to make a threat, you had better be prepared to carry it out. Especially when you essentially knew that the UN route was probably destined to fail.

I don't deny that Downing Street is interesting. But it is interesting in documenting the history of decision-making in the run up to the war. Not as the ever-elusive smoking gun that Democrats are always attempting to manufacture. I truly believe that when they start to re-allocate their time to developing an agenda and a genuine voice as opposed to playing 'gotcha' they'll have better traction at the polls.